350 papers · page 4 of 18
Modern computing systems are embracing hybrid memory comprising of DRAM and non-volatile memory (NVM) to combine the best properties of both memory technologies, achieving low latency, high reliability, and high density. A prominent characteristic of DRAM-NVM hybrid memory is tha…
Phase change memory (PCM) is a scalable non-volatile memory technology that has low access latency (like DRAM) and high capacity (like Flash). Writing to PCM incurs significantly higher latency and energy penalties compared to reading its content. A prominent characteristic of PC…
Previous works on leak-tolerating GC and write-rationing GC show that most reads/writes in an application are concentrated to a small number of objects. This suggests that many applications enjoy a clear and stable clustering of hot (recently read and/or written) and cold (the in…
Write barriers are a fundamental mechanism that most production garbage collection algorithms depend on. They inform the collector of mutations to the object graph, enabling partial heap collections, concurrent collection, and reference counting. While in principle, write barrier…
Efficient garbage collection is a key goal in engineering high-performance runtime systems. To reduce pause times, many collector designs traverse the object graph concurrently with the application, an optimization known as concurrent marking. Traditional concurrent marking impos…
Parallel copying garbage collection (GC) is widely used in the de facto Java virtual machines such as OpenJDK and OpenJ9. OpenJDK uses work-stealing for copying objects in the Parallel GC and Garbage-First (G1) GC policies to balance the copying task among GC threads. When a thre…
Generational garbage collectors are one of the most common types of automatic memory management. We can minimize the costs they incur by carefully choosing the points in a program's execution at which they run. However, this decision is generally based on simple, crude heuristics…
Apache Spark is a popular cluster computing framework for iterative analytics workloads due to its use of Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs) to cache data for in-memory processing. We have revealed that the performance of Spark RDD cache can be severely limited if its capacity…
Deep learning models are becoming larger and will not fit in the limited memory of accelerators such as GPUs for training. Though many methods have been proposed to solve this problem, they are rather ad-hoc in nature and difficult to extend and integrate with other techniques. I…
One common characteristic among current lock-free memory allocators is that they rely on the operating system to manage memory since they lack a lower-level mechanism capable of splitting and coalescing blocks of memory. In this paper, we discuss this problem and we propose a gen…
Memory allocation is increasingly important to parallel performance, yet it is challenging because a program has data of many sizes, and the demand differs from thread to thread. Modern allocators use highly tuned heuristics but do not provide uniformly good performance when the …
snmalloc is an implementation of malloc aimed at workloads in which objects are typically deallocated by a different thread than the one that had allocated them. We use the term producer/consumer for such workloads. snmalloc uses a novel message passing scheme which returns deall…
Ruby is a popular object-oriented programming language, and the performance of the Ruby garbage collector (GC) directly affects the execution time of Ruby programs. Ruby 2.0 and earlier versions employed an inefficient non-generational conservative mark-and-sweep GC. To improve t…
Memory fragmentation is a widely studied problem of dynamic memory allocators. It is well known that fragmentation can lead to premature out-of-memory errors and poor cache performance.
We propose a scalable, cycle-collecting, decentralized, reference counting garbage collector with partial tracing. The algorithm is based on the Brownbridge system but uses four different types of references to label edges. Memory usage is O (log n) bits per node, where n is the …
Cache in multicore machines is often shared, and the cache performance depends on how memory accesses belonging to different programs interleave with one another. The full range of performance possibilities includes all possible interleavings, which are too numerous to be studied…
The cloud is an increasingly popular platform to deploy applications as it lets cloud users to provide resources to their applications as needed. Furthermore, cloud providers are now starting to offer a "pay-as-you-use" model in which users are only charged for the resources that…
Modern software systems heavily use the memory heap. As systems grow more complex and compute with increasing amounts of data, it can be difficult for developers to understand how their programs actually use the bytes that they allocate on the heap and whether improvements are po…
Web applications employ key-value stores to cache the data that is most commonly accessed. The cache improves an web application's performance by serving its requests from memory, avoiding fetching them from the backend database. Since the memory space is limited, maximizing the …
Work-stealing is promising for scheduling and balancing parallel workloads. It has a wide range of applicability on middleware, libraries, and runtime systems of programming languages. OpenJDK uses work-stealing for copying garbage collection (GC) to balance copying tasks among G…